My post on tango from a couple of months back is now my fifth most popular post in the two years I’ve been on this blog. It’s odd because people always say they want stuff about history or writing. What to do?
How about I post about tango and history? Or tango and writing?
Or, because tango is a fairly visual thing, tango in films?
OK, let’s do that.
Tango in history
Tango doesn’t feature in my books at all, despite the first of my books about James Burke (Burke in the Land of Silver) being set largely in Buenos Aires. That’s because the action takes place early in the 19th century and tango didn’t really start until rather later. According to the famous Argentine tango historian, Horatio Ferrer “the spiritual and artistic genesis of tango took place from about 1880 to circa 1895”.
Tango remained virtually unknown outside South America until
the early 20th century. Then it moved to Europe, notably Paris, where it became
very fashionable. It spread across the continent, reaching Helsinki just before
the First World War, where it developed into the distinctive Finnish Tango that
is still popular today. By the 1920s tango was being filmed. Rudolph Valentino
was hugely successful with films like The
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The tango singer, Carlos Gardel, starred
in a series of films from The Lights of
Buenos Aires in 1931 until his death in 1935. Many of his films were
released by Paramount in the USA and although they were made in Spanish they drew
big audiences and moved tango further into the mainstream.
Carlos Gardel’s Grave
Vernon and Irene Castle, who were influential ballroom
dancers and teachers at a time when that was pretty much like rock-star status
now, adapted the tango to make it more acceptable to conservative American
dancers. (They even developed a version where the partners did not touch each
other at all.) Eventually their approach developed into ballroom tango, which
has only a tangential relationship to Argentine tango, but which remains
popular with Strictly fans to today.
Tango in books
One of my favourite books ever is the totally wonderful Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance by Lloyd Jones.It’s a book about life and death, loss and rediscovery and it made me cry, but in a good way. Tango is a central motif of the book and, unlike a lot of fiction about the dance, it’s been written by someone who understands it so well you can practically use it as a teach-yourself book. (Please don’t though. There is no substitute for proper lessons.)
Apart from Here at the
End of the World… tango seems strangely absent in European and American
literature. Tony Parsons’ Starting Over
finds his hero finally redeemed by dance in the milongas of Buenos Aires but
most of the fiction that Goodreads files under ‘tango’ has titles like Red Hot Fantasy and Laid Bare. Tango’s reputation for sexual impropriety lives on in
books like these.
The Tango Singer
is a lovely Argentine book that sees Buenos Aires through the story of a
mythical tango singer, though the book (like many Argentinians) concentrates on
the songs rather than the dance.
The best accounts of tango in books are through memoirs.
Amongst tango dancers the favourite (and quite a succes de scandale when it was published in 2012) is probably Twelve Minutes of Love, a
reference to the average length of time a couple will dance together before
changing partners. The Bulgarian author, Kapka Kassabova, has travelled round
the world behaving disgracefully in tango salons wherever she went and her
deliciously indiscreet memoir left red faces from New Zealand to Scotland.
Another classic is Long After Midnight at the Nino Bien
which is part coming-of-age story and part travelogue as a young American moves
to Buenos Aires and falls desperately in love with his tango teacher.
Another memoir, Bad Times in Buenos Aires, is unusual for a story
about living in Buenos Aires because the writer cheerfully admits to not being
able to dance and not really understanding tango at all. It is, perhaps, a
useful antidote to the other books I’ve mentioned.
Tango in films
While tango hardly
features in European and American novels, you can scarcely move for tango in
the movies. I’ve already mentioned the films of Carlos Gardel and Rudolph
Valentino, but Argentina still produces great tango movies. My personal
favourite is Tango.
There are plenty of
tangos in mainstream US and European films, though. Probably the most
well-known is the stunning tango scene in Scent of a Woman.
There are films
where tango is central to the plot, like Robert Duvall’s Assassination Tango and others where it is only incidental.
Often it is used for humour – a favourite of mine is in Addams Family Values (definitely not one for purists!).
I could carry on
listing tango movies for a very long time. (I once went to a club where one evening
we danced to nothing but film music for hours). It’s probably best not to push
my luck now. Do say if you want more.
Happy tango!
Reference
Horatio Ferrer’s classic history of tango is a multi-volume epic that foreign dignitaries may be presented with on State Visits. Ferrer is a poet rather than a historian and it’s not an easy read. The shorter English language version published by Manrique Zago ediciones is not an easy read either, but the illustrations are profuse and gorgeous. Well worth a look if you are interested in the history of tango.
A word from our sponsor
That’s enough tango for one week. I’ll be back again next week. I post something on this blog a little over once a week on average, but I don’t make a penny out of it. If you enjoy reading the blog, the only thing I ask is that you buy one or more of my books. If this post has interested you at all in Argentina (a wonderful country) then you might like to consider Burke in the Land of Silver, which is largely set in Buenos Aires during the years when people were beginning to rise against Spanish rule. Argentina finally achieved independence in 1816.
If you would like to know more about the tango scene in London or get advice on how to start learning to dance, do get in touch through the ‘Contact’ page.
When Stars Will Shine
is a collection of more than 20 short stories – some very short and some rather
more substantial. They are all on a theme of Christmas
and, because the book is being sold in aid of a military charity (Help for
Heroes ) many, though by no means all, of the writers have chosen to include
soldiers or ex-soldiers in the stories. Otherwise these stories have very
little in common. Some are funny – some of them very funny. (Lucy Cameron’s What Can Possibly Go Wrong? was a personal
favourite.) Some are horror stories. Several, given the Christmas theme, are
inevitably sentimental, often combined with a liberal attack on our uncaring
society that can become cloying. The message that we treat veterans shockingly
badly is one that needs to be heard, but light fiction may not always be the
right place.
Obviously I enjoyed some of these
stories much more than others, but that is inevitably the way with a collection
of short stories by different authors. It will probably be the case for most
readers, but what I enjoyed they may hate and what turned them off may have
been the ones I most liked. It’s like a tin of Quality Street. Some people like
the soft centres and some people like the nuts, but you have to rummage around
in the tin and pick out your personal favourites. All of the stories are
professional efforts by experienced writers. Given this, I’m not going to go
through recommending this or that story. A collection this size will have
something to offer almost everybody and, at just £2 on Kindle (https://www.amazon.co.uk/When-Stars-Will-Shine-Helping-ebook/dp/B08234131P) it represents excellent value for money. And all the proceeds go
to Help for Heroes, which offers ex-servicemen the help they should be able to
expect from government but often don’t seem to get.
I see beggars on our local train clean
up every night by pretending to be ex-soldiers. (They aren’t.) People hand over
money because, whatever you think of the wars we have sent people to fight over
the past decades, the men and women who fought them went because our government
sent them and we owe them something. If everyone who gave money to beggars with
a hard-luck story bought this book instead (or just donated directly to Help
for Heroes) it would make a real difference.
Lynn Bryant studied history at university and her books,
though an exciting read if enjoyed as pure invention, are excellent primers on
the history of the Napoleonic Wars. It does mean that any review of her books
ends up being a discussion/instant summary of historical incidents, so I’m
moving this from my occasional Tuesday book review slot to here on Friday.
People said they wanted more blog posts about history, so history you will get.
‘This Blighted Expedition‘ is the second in a series of books about Hugh Kelly, the Manx captain of the fictional HMS Iris. You’ll probably enjoy it more if you read the first in the series (‘An Unwilling Alliance’) but you don’t have to have read that to enjoy this one.
The Walcheren Campaign: the facts
Captain Kelly is off to Walcheren, arguably Britain’s
greatest military disaster of the early 19th century. Never heard of
it? That is so often the way with great military disasters. (Don’t cite the
Charge of the Light Brigade: this was a whole different level of awful.)
Walcheren was an island that commanded the approach to Antwerp, where the
French had a large number of ships that the British quite liked the idea of
sinking. To do this, they would need to land on Walcheren and then leapfrog
troops to Antwerp to capture the town. This was to be achieved by transporting
around 40,000 troops in one of the biggest fleets ever assembled. What could
possibly go wrong?
The answer is: practically everything. Delayed by poor
administration and bad weather, the fleet set off so late that the French were
prepared for them. Adverse winds meant that the Navy couldn’t provide the Army
with its promised support. Maps were unreliable and details of French defences
were out of date. The weather was appalling. Worst of all, it turned out that
Walcheren was a breeding ground for mosquitoes that carried malaria.
The evacuation of Walcheren by the English – By Henri Félix Emmanuel Philippoteaux
The Army was struck down by plague of almost biblical
proportions: four thousand died of malaria or typhoid fever. (Only 106 died in
combat.) Many of the survivors were plagued with recurring bouts of fever for
the rest of their lives (a typical problem with malaria). Wellington complained
that troops sent to joint his Peninsular campaign after Walcheren were often
hit with fever on arrival and were unfit for service.
So what line does the book take?
As with her other books, Bryant neatly interweaves romantic threads and straightforward military history in a way that many other authors find hard to get right. Hugh Kelly is still married to Roseen, the girl he courted in ‘An Unwilling Alliance’. She is now the mother of his young son and, though she has travelled with her husband on non-combat missions in the past, she is now firmly left behind when he sails into danger. News of the sickness in Walcheren, though, has her abandon her son with friends to sail to the Low Countries so that she can help to nurse the sick. It’s a credible plot line and the story benefits from her perspective as well as that of the fighting men.
Not that Roseen is the only romantic interest in the story. There are two other women who appear, one taking a significant role while the other seems more likely to feature in future books. The formidable Katja de Groot, a Dutch businesswoman, is a well-drawn and fully realised character, who takes up with a British soldier who is billeted on her. The other, a British girl who is one of the startling number of hangers-on who have come to see the fun, is more sketchy. She’s a sweet young thing whose father is a brute and who is being shown-off to any putative husband with the money or connections to improve the family’s social connections. The ending suggests she will return. One of Dawson’s characters is smitten: “She is intelligent, witty and very lovely.” We are, I am sure, going to discover her hidden depths in the future.
The number of romances gives an idea of the sheer scale of Bryant’s book. We follow not only Captain Kelly and his remarkable First Lieutenant Alfred Durrell, but a lot of the soldiers they work alongside. Many of these are in the fictitious 110th Regiment whose adventures in the Peninsular are the subject of her other series, the Peninsular War Saga, which allows her to have already fully developed characters available for this book. Reading the Peninsular War Saga may mean you enjoy ‘This Blighted Expedition’ even more, but I’ve read only the first in the series and I had no problems with understanding the nature of the 110th.
Durrell is attached to Home Popham, the ambitious post-captain who, despite his lowly rank, is widely credited as the man behind the whole disastrous expedition. Durrell is also an acquaintance of Lord Chatham, the nominal commander of the enterprise. Through his eyes, we see the way that the expedition is led and some of the inter-personal and inter-service squabbles that contributed to the disaster.
It is a tribute to Bryant’s skill that, except for some
junior officers, she keeps the vast cast well delineated so that even a
moderately inattentive reader like me seldom finds himself muddling his characters
together.
There is a certain amount of military action which provides
some excitement, but most of the drama takes place in the meetings of senior
officers. Bryant takes the line that Lord Chatham was set up to take the blame
for Walcheren because it was politically expedient for him to become the
scapegoat, although we are left in no doubt that Popham is the villain here.
More facts: the politics
Bryant’s research is impeccable. As a writer of military
historical fiction myself, I am absolutely in awe of the depth of her research
and the amount of detail she integrates into her plots. When it comes to the
politics of the Walcheren campaign she relies a lot on Jacqueline Reiter’s
book, ‘The Late Lord,’ which I reviewed a few weeks ago.
It’s a reasonable approach as Reiter’s book seems to be the definitive account.
She does, though, get caught up with Reiter’s interest in the way that Chatham
was treated after Walcheren. There was an Enquiry by the House of Commons
sitting as a committee and Chatham was, as the phrase goes, stitched up like a
kipper (allegedly).
Once everyone is safely back in England, Bryant carries on with
a view of the enquiry. Durrell is called as a witness, so we get to see things
close up. Unfortunately the way that Lord This was trying to get one over on
Lord That and that Mr Somebody was trying to do down What’s’isname requires
more than a casual interest in the politics of the period. Pop quiz: who was
the Prime Minister in 1810? If you don’t know (it was Spencer Perceval) then
this will not be your favourite part of the book. It’s one of those cases where
the history in historical fiction beats the fiction to a slow and painful
death.
Conclusion: read this book
Don’t let the political coda put you off. Bryant makes it as
interesting as it could be and there’s lots of fun with the characters we have
come to love at Walcheren as they try to get back to normal life – or as normal
as it could be in a country still at war.
There is still a young girl’s love to be won, reputations to
be made and battles ahead to fight.
Bryant is a lovely writer with a nice prose style and the
ability to fill a story with exciting incident. She blends real historical
detail with complete fabrication in a way that leaves you unable to see the
joins. It’s a book that kept me reading late into the night.
‘This Blighted Expedition’, despite its slightly damp-squib
ending, is a fantastic read. The ending isn’t an ending at all, of course
(always a potential problem with series books). To find out how everything
finally works out, I’ll be reading the next book to follow the life and times
of Captain Hugh Kelly and his wife as they sail on through the Napoleonic Wars.
Rather to my surprise posts about my travels seem to go down
quite well, according to the number of
views they got last year. So this week I’m writing a little about a recent visit
to Yorkshire.
The Royal Armouries moved out of London to Leeds in 1996.
Sadly this makes it inconvenient for me to get to, but I made a special trip
just before Christmas.
It’s an amazing museum, purpose-built to house one of the
world’s great collections of arms and armour. The Hall of Steel, six floors of
hardware, is an impressive introduction.
There are some stunning examples of European armour like
this one.
This was made as a Christmas present to the Elector
Christian I of Saxony from his wife, Sophia, in 1591. Sadly, despite repeated
hints, I didn’t find a similar half-armour under my tree on Christmas Day.
Beautiful as the European arms and armour are, my real interest is in Eastern weaponry and the Armouries have a lovely (if rather hidden away) collection. I’ve written on my old blog about kris. Kris are a Malay weapon and feature in my first book, The White Rajah. They are fascinating weapons, but there aren’t that many on display in UK museums. The Royal Armouries, though, have some lovely examples including a Balinese kris. I have seen people dancing with kris in Bali, but the faceted hilt was new to me.
There were some other examples of weaponry from the world of
The White Rajah, including a sharply
angled parang from the Philippines.
In The White Rajah
there is mention of the padded body armour the Malays wore, but this is the
first time I have seen the armour worn by the Moro people of the Philippines.
The Armouries describe it as “unique”, which seems highly likely. It’s a mail
and plate construction with the plates made of horn and the mail of brass. The
Armouries suggest that the style derives from the armour of the mediaeval
Islamic world.
The armour is accompanied by shields described as
“captured from ‘Sea Dyak pirates’” in 1848 – presumably in some of the
encounters described in The White Rajah.
I was quite excited to see them.
Moving from the world of
The White Rajah to India, there are a few nice examples of Indian weapons.
They include tulwar swords and peshkabz daggers. These featured in my
old blog back in 2016 if you are interested in reading more about them.
The strangest Indian edged weapons (which definitely do not feature in any of my books) are a pair of tusk swords (above), which were fitted to the tusks of war elephants. (There’s a display of a full set of protective armour for a war-elephant too, mounted on a model elephant. It is, to put it mildly, impressive.) There is a display devoted to the Indian Mutiny, which I enjoyed given that Cawnpore is set in the middle of that conflict, but the weaponry shown there is not particularly interesting.
One of the things that makes kris particularly interesting
is the watering in the blade . You can see this very clearly
in this example from the Royal Armouries.
This is caused because the blade is made of strips of iron
and steel together steel is hard but brittle, the iron softer. Mixing the two can produce the ideal blade, given the
limitations of the technology for making steel at the time that the swords were
made. (If you want a more detailed discussion of the technology of this,
there’s one on my old blog HERE.) Anyway, I mention this now because while I was in Yorkshire I
went to see the Jorvik Viking museum in
York, which is a lovely museum and well worth a visit if only to admire a sock
that is over a thousand years old.
Woolen sock in Jorvik Centre
Given my interest in swords, though, I particularly admired
this one, which was found not in York, but in Windsor. I had a long chat with
one of the experts there who said that it was probably made by a particularly
good swordsmith and that it would have been owned by someone of high status.
You can see that, like the kris, it is made of strips of different metal – some
almost pure iron, some carbonised to steel. After centuries in the ground,
rusting has eaten away the edges of these strips, making it very clear how the
sword was made. So here we have two swords, literally half a world and hundreds
of years apart, both made using very similar technology.
Close-up of sword
I could go on about Chinese swords
Nepalese kukris
Or even this rather lovely specimen from Burma.
Not everyone, though, shares my fascination with swords.
I’ll stop now.
If anyone does want more about arms or armour, do feel free
to say so in the ‘Comments’ below.
Publicity about this book talks about somebody being sent
back in time to save the Crown of France, but it’s not an actual physical crown
that she is sent to save. Rather, she has to save the life
of one young man whose descendants will eventually become rulers of France.
The plot’s immaterial, really. The book is
mainly an opportunity to explore the world of the 13th century. There’s a bit
of history about the Crusades, but mainly it’s social history. What was it like
to live then? Dull, if the truth be told. If you want to get from A to B you
walk. If you’re lucky and rich, you may ride. There’s a lot of getting from A
to B in this book. Walking or riding, travelling takes a very long time and for
most of that time nothing really happens. According to this story your journey
may be broken by occasional extreme violence and quite a bit of sex, but much
of the sex will be boring too. (A huge shame as Macaire’s other books include
some brilliant sex scenes, both erotic and hilarious.) If your journey takes
you across the sea, you will do it in a boat which, lacking portholes, will
mean being shut up in a small, dark cabin. Inevitably this is, once again, dull
stuff until you are caught in a storm when it is extremely unpleasant and for
many of the travellers, fatal.
Our heroine’s journey takes us to
Tunis, on the Eighth Crusade. There are a couple of battles, but little detail
of the military goings-on. There is rather more detail of the aftermath – the
dead and dying and the general unpleasantness of war. As with most wars at the
time, disease is an even greater threat than the enemy and when the army
returns to Europe (more storms, more dull travelling) it’s a great deal smaller
than it was when it left.
All that sex results in pregnancy. (We
are told that people are very relaxed about sex, but I doubt that that is true
given that the danger of pregnancy – and the terrible consequences if unmarried
– must have discouraged most young women from casual encounters.) Our heroine
ends up with a baby, but no husband. Awkward. Fortunately, love (in the form of
a kind older man) conquers all and we have a happy, if hardly politically
correct, ending.
A Crown in Time is a great introduction
to the 13th century and Macaire is certainly more fun to read than a
school textbook. There’s more than a little school textbook in it, though, the
narrator often commenting on life at the time, with even the odd statistical
snip:
“Childbirth was the main cause of death among women at that time, with one-third of the deaths of adult women due to complications.”
Read it if you’ve always wanted to know more about 13th century France or if you enjoy exploring new worlds in an undemanding story.
A Crown in Time
Publisher: Headline Publishing Group (paperback copy) ISBN: 9781786157768
